Sporty Spice has let herself go a little

Addiction is no laughing matter, so apologies to “Lauren” if she feels this is targeted at her.

The actual target is the (either) stupidity or mendacity of people like Paul McNamara;

I can’t comment on the cause of the other hundreds of deaths of homeless people, but I’m willing to bet my home on the fact that Lauren’s partner, Dean, didn’t die of homelessness. He died because he miscalculated how much (presumably) opiate he injected into his blood stream.

Paul McNamara either knows this and is tweeting his hashtags in bad faith or he’s a bit simple.

I’d like to assume McNamara is tweeting in good faith and is just a little naïve, but when one looks into the subject it becomes obvious here’s some significant obfuscation going on. In a trend that seems to be common to every area of public discourse these days, the definition of terms one would have previously assumed were universally-agreed has been subverted.

In this example, the term “homelessness” seems to no longer mean that someone is living on the street, in a doorway in the cold, but more like “living in short term accommodation”, which, although not ideal, is very definitely not the same as being exposed to the extremes of the climate and random violence.

In fact, finding reliable statistics on the previous definition of homelessness requires a search for terms like, “sleeping rough”. At which point, this research is found.

Its findings? The reason 50% of the people in the UK who sleep on the streets are not in safe accommodation is because they have mental health issues. The second largest cause at 43% is drug and alcohol addiction.

Bill’s Opinion

Claiming homelessness is the cause of deaths on the street is like claiming gravity is the cause of death of mountaineers.

11 Replies to “Sporty Spice has let herself go a little”

In the North Atlantic countries, the homeless are often those who have been kicked out of shelters for antisocial behaviour. Recently California has become a popular destination for career homeless, perhaps because drugs are more easily available, and the shelters have been overwhelmed. Being a misfit is, as you say, often a result of poor mental health. Many of those people would previously have been institutionalised. Now the response is to give them a packet of pills and leave them to fend for themselves. It’s a dilemma, which is a problem with no right answer: all solutions can be proved to be wrong. People have slipped through the welfare net. Ethically I can’t say that stray dogs deserve to be rescued, but not humans. Something “needs to be done,” but what?

This morphing of the term homeless is de rigueur here in Ireland as well. It took me aback when they were discussing ‘homelessness’ on the radio and the number was unfeasibly large. I was wondering where they were hiding them all because I live in Dublin and have only ever seen a tenth as many as were being discussed – forget the exact figure but it was large.

Turns out as you say, that they were discussing those mostly single mothers in short term accommodation, i.e. hostels and\or hotels. It’s apparently terrible as you can’t cook and have to leave the room for a good portion of the daylight hours. No mention that it’s way better than a cardboard box and that quite a few have done it to themselves to move up the housing list.

The actual homeless people, almost entirely men with mental health or addiction problems, or both, are nowhere to be found in the news and no one seems to give a good Goddamn about them.

It’s the modern method; take a terrible situation impacting a very small part of the population (eg the medical condition resulting in ‘intersex’), conflate it with adjacent but different conditions (eg the mental illness resulting in body dismorphia), push for funding and legislation covering both.

It’s hard to work out which commentators are conscious they are doing this and those who’ve simply swallowed the line without question.

I read most of the Irish so called homeless press reports, reminds me of victory.

Looking forward to the Irish film Rosie being released down under.

When the good lord was dishing out stupidity he was very generous to would be Irish poets.

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One roadside banner I spotted in a coastal region on the day of the announcement made clear the anger at lucrative short lettings that disadvantage locals: “200,000 holiday houses empty yet 10,000 homeless can’t be right.”

How is the house hunting going Bill, I see that there are some recent sellers treating themselves to a massive serving of the magic pudding. Bob Hawke deserves every bit of his effortless gain, this guy is probably the biggest and single most reason that all of us Aussies are so filthy rich these days. If only we had a cure for old age, he would be PM tomorrow.

But I love this recent one the most, the vendor trousered another and additional $1m of free money for doing nothing more than taking a plane to China, you couldn’t make it up, I guess they aint making any more of it at the end of the day.

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Meanwhile, his vendors boarded the plane for their 10-hour flight.

When they landed, they were greeted with a flurry of messages to contact Mr Clarke.
“When I finally got in touch with them I said I have some good news and some bad news,” Mr Clarke said. “I said, the bad news is, I have had to give your tv away, but the good news is that I have got another million dollars for your property.”
In the time it took the vendors to fly to China, the sale price had blown up to $7.55 million — not a bad return on the property they paid $4.625 million for in 2014.

I put it under contract of sale and the buyer doesn’t complete on settlement, and I didn’t get enough earnest money deposit from him?

Where the bottom is nobody knows, but the good buys are to be had when now and when you are looking for one and find one that for some reason no one else has and the vendor has no choice and must take your price, chances are that you will have to be getting around a bit to come across one like that. But they are out there in this type of market.